The LPE Project is teaming up with the American Constitution Society (ACS) to offer an online course introducing students to LPE analysis. This course will pair lectures and short readings that illustrate how LPE frameworks can help us examine law’s role in the perpetuation of racial and gender injustice, the devaluation of social and ecological reproduction, and the violence of the carceral state under capitalism. It will also look at how LPE scholars use the law & political economy framework to explore concrete legal reforms designed to move beyond neoliberalism and toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy, with critical attention to the need for power and movement-building as part of any such transformation. Join us for the fifth session with Lev Menand.
“Law of Money & Banking”
What is money? What do banks do? And how do central banks like the Federal Reserve fit in? This lecture will analyze the institutional architecture and administrative processes that the United States uses to create money and show how this monetary system governs economic activity and distributes wealth and power, domestically and internationally. It will also trace the rise of inequality and the financialization of the economy over the last half century to the erosion of the U.S. statutory framework for money and banking and the deterioration of the American Monetary Settlement, an arrangement that dates back to the nineteenth century and pairs publicly chartered, privately-owned banks with a set of terms and conditions including structural separations and government supervision.
With commentary from Amy Kapczynski and Ganesh Sitaraman.
Suggested Reading:
pg. 103-113 of Professor Menand’s forthcoming article “Why Supervise Banks? The Foundations of the American Monetary Settlement”
The slides from the lecture are available here: